Why time is not running out
paraschopra.com
paraschopra.com
He ignores the fact that some of us aren't happy unless we are doing something that stands to make a double-digit percentage of humans on Earth happier, cleaner, safer, healthier, or more efficient.
We, the readership of HN, are privileged beyond imagination. For the most part, we are rich white educated American males. This affords us leverage in almost everything we do - some of us have actually achieved what I've described and it is not unreasonable for just about any of us to believe we can do the same...
...PROVIDED WE STOP WASTING TIME AND GET TO WORK.
I cannot think of a single product/thing/whatever that accomplished the goal you mentioned.
The "dent in the universe" bullshit is such hypocritical thinking that it makes me sick.
Lets talk about Google.
Productive in absolutely all possible ways. Cleaner? Yes Safer? Yes. Happier? Happiness can't be a metric because its way too subjective.
Cleaner? People don't need to go to a public library for any question they have; so yes. Also many people used to print before they know they could find anything anytime on the internet; so studying required a lot of printer ink and paper.
More productive? In the term that you search absolutely anything related to your field and you find it instantly; sometimes you don't even have to click the page because the summary already answer your question. The pages saved in cache are awesome feature.
Safer? People relies on their own gut much less than before; instead they do a quick search in Google about how to do something wish usually includes safety recommendations about the task.
I know I am giving Google properties that are part of overall internet; but if a house doesn't have any entering door It is useless doesn't matter how full and complete is inside.
Really? Let's look at his goal again (my emphasis):
> make a double-digit percentage of humans on Earth happier, cleaner, safer, healthier, or more efficient.
Hey, a union! That makes his claim a lot weaker and far easier to justify. Now we'll be generous and ask for 10%, the lowest double-digit percent, of the population. What's a candidate technology that immediately comes to my mind in the past? The microcomputer. Let's suppose the microcomputer revolution didn't begin until 1975. The world population in 1975 was about 4 billion, ten percent of that is 400 million, which is a little more than the current US population. Do you think that over the last 40 years, the microcomputer has not achieved an improvement in any of happiness, cleanliness, safety, health, or efficiency for just 400 million people? What planet are you living on? I'd say the microcomputer even satisfies the intersection of those improvements as well, but that was not the parent's claim for a goal.
Maybe it's hard to achieve the goal over a short timespan you say. Let's pick a more modern example, then. If you believe Facebook, they have over 800m active users worldwide, which satisfies the 10% barrier quite nicely for our bloated 7 billion world population, and they've been around for less than a decade. Are you going to say that Facebook doesn't improve any of happiness, cleanliness, safety, health, or efficiency for those active users? Come on. I don't particularly like Facebook myself but I wouldn't make such a negative claim.
Ed: looks like I was beat to the punch on the obvious example of Facebook.
I know, it is a saying, but take a look at "important people" that lived 2,000 years ago. How many do you know? 5? 10? What about the other millions of people?
Thing is, this whole "dent in the universe" thing leads to discussions that are pretty close to comparing cock lengths. "My goal is so much more worthy than yours - I'm making a dent in the universe", which I find highly hypocritical.
I believe there's no fundamental difference between the "dent-in-the-universe-webservice" that some people claim to develop and, say, lolcats. At least the latter made millions of people laugh for a moment.
After seeing this answer there is only two possibilities; you are either trolling or have a psycological condition that makes you take any statement way too literal.
When people talks about a "dent on the universe" they usually mean people in the same time and age in the planet earth.
I wouldn't go that far. Sounds to me like the OP is telling those who are obsessed with altruistic life goals, to the point where it is paralyzing them with anxiety and endless self-judgment, to relax, chill out, and focus on their own happiness once in a while.
In any case, there's nothing wrong with being a nihilist. For all you know I'm a figment of your imagination.
Such people will almost never be happy, then.
Here's the rub: creating and capturing value are dramatically different categories of skill. Both are rare (at high levels) in their own right, and they seem to be negatively correlated. Most people who are great at one are terrible at the other.
So what most average people do is they find a veteran value-capturer (a boss, or a company) and get "a job" where they create value in small but stable amounts and leave the value-capture to someone else, who takes the glut of reward and then turns around and disburses just enough funds to keep most people (save the few the company wants to get rid of) afloat. Over time, such people lose the incentive to create value and become complacent so their value-creation skills fade, and they never get the know-how or connections that would help them capture value, because their bosses don't want to give that shit up.
If you want to have a real, lasting, visible effect on the world, you need both skill sets. Why? Because very few people listen to a person without money or power. If you want a say in this world, which you'll need if you intend to create value at scale, then you have no choice but to capture value, as dirty and nasty as that art can be, in order to get the right to speak.
Idealistic people tend to hate the morally gray, political stuff they have to do if they want to capture any value. You're competing against some of the worst that humanity has to offer, and you find out quickly some of the things people (often driven by pure narcissism, and not a desire to change the world) will do in order to win.
The end result is the same, and one doesn't need both skills.
That's precisely what I'm arguing is not a healthy attitude. If you're unhappy now, I don't think you will be satisfied with what you have done and would be able to die peacefully _once_ you get featured on Time magazine proclaiming how you reduced poverty in Bangladesh. By then, your goals would have moved to something even bigger. By all means, improving state of humanity is a noble goal but being unhappy because you haven't been able to make sufficient progress towards it is an unhealthy attitude.
"For instance, there are two different un- prefixes in English: one meaning 'not, opposite of', the other meaning 'reverse action, deprive of, release from'. The first prefix un- 'not' is attached to adjective and participle bases while the second prefix un- 'reverse action' is attached to either verb or noun bases." (From wikipedia)
Since we're talking about an adjective base here, "not happy" === "unhappy".
Hmm, I have two reactions to this.
1. You're right, there's much to be done and little time to do it. 2. Chill, grab a <your favorite libation here>, and enjoy the sunset; there will never be another like it ever again.
I've been thinking the last few weeks about this sorta very thing - so much to do, so little time. I live in San Francisco. I've worked for 'stratups' (I hate that term now) the past few years and there's always that cloud of "hurry up!" hanging over one's head.
Hurry up before someone else launches before you! Hurry up or you'll loose first mover advantage! Hurry up because we have this deadline and if we don't make it, we'll loose customer opportunities!
I starting to be so over that crap. Maybe it's burn out. Maybe I really see through this ruse (maybe it's not a ruse at all). I feel like I'm a capitalist like the next guy, but constantly being focused on work and reading about 'startup' (shudder) founders and how they have to choose between work and family or work and life is bullshit.
I'm not sure if this pace of 'innovation' is making humans happier, cleaner, etc. I mean, I suppose on the scale of humanity it is, but I don't see certain small companies making any dent in humanity. Hence, what the OP is saying. Sure, some companies do make dents, but like everything, it's a numbers game and most won't. So I'm really starting to feel like I want to work much less and enjoy my time outside of work and with family much more. Being on someone else's clock and having all my (or most of my) mental energy focused on their dream or even my dream where I might be overtaken any moment from some competitor is total suck. I feel like we're all living in some state of paranoia - oh noes, I'll be overtaken any moment if I don't get this build out tonight..
This post probably won't matter much to anyone (maybe a few?) and definitely won't matter at all to the planet, solar system, galaxy, universe. I won't matter when it comes down to it and I'm probably the rule, definitely not the exception. Realizing this is ok and helps me re-focus my attention (because that's the most important thing we have) on what really matters - life, family, friends, vacations :). Balance.
Maybe getting to work helping people is good, but getting to work to just get rich, wear one's self ragged, make someone else rich - that seems like exercise in stupidity and totally unbalanced.
Marathon runners run a lot, but not every minute. People who produce, also may want to ration out effort in a sustainable program.
For instance, everyone can plant trees. Over one lifetime they can amount to an entire forest, especially if you take reproduction into account. One forest creates stupidly huge amounts of value (non-monetary, I would say) that countless forms of life will benefit from for decades or even centuries to come.
That sort of thing should not be neglected.
If you buy this philosophy then the importance of time vanishes and there is no need to pretend that you have all the time in the universe. Choosing to waste time is not objectively worse (though it may be boring) and on these grounds I agree with the author.
However by the author's same reasoning it is not important to be happy either. After you have died it will not matter how you felt while you were alive. So to me the conclusion is silly.
But I nevertheless enjoyed the article. I do ponder my own life from time to time and I like reading about how other people deal with the finiteness, or rather infinitesimal-ness- of it all -- just the idea terrifies me. (So does the idea of living forever -- a pretty unfortunate Catch-22.)
But being happy does matter in terms of how you feel now or while living. I think one point is that it does not make me happier to worry about how big my legacy is in regard to contribution to the world in financial, technological or social ways.
If I can make this world a better place, that's great, and a worthy objective. But as the goal posts are always changing, and because we are inherently limited in how much we can achieve, it is good to take time and make sure to enjoy life (as happiness not only feels good but enables greater achievements).
So, be happy and do as much as you can instead of doing as much as you can and always feel bad because it will never be enough.
Apparently, happiness is also linked to reproduction and many "worthwhile" activities are ultimately linked to happiness. But I'm digressing here... Brain seeks happiness and in absence creates discomfort that is by definition undesirable and that is why (so obviously) it is important to be happy even if "nothing really matters" ultimately.
This isn't quite true. All evolution cares about is reproduction, that's literally it. It only tangentially cares about happiness/earning millions/whatever if it improves reproductive ability (which they probably do).
I reject the notion that "being happy" is a binary thing or some plateau of state of mind one achieves for some duration, though I think the concept of happiness as a fuzzy cluster of feelings that make one say "I feel happy" is a useful simplification. There are many forms of happiness of many durations, some quite complex and dependent on many variables or past states of mind. The chemical soup in a happy brain has many possible configurations. Even when I feel super-happy I still wonder if perhaps there's a higher form of happiness I could achieve, and then I wonder what sorts of happiness I'd experience with a different mind design (which is why I won't wirehead indefinitely even though wireheading would give all possible forms of human happiness).
To me this post really comes across not as championing "happiness is what matters", but rather the more depressing "be content with your lot in life." No sah! That's for religious folk and for people who just crossed Atheist River but haven't finished questioning all their religious indoctrination! A better message I think is simply "If you aren't feeling the way you want to feel, change something. You don't have to feel that way you know, even if changing is really hard and takes years." But that's not really profound...
"it makes absolutely no difference to what you are doing as long as it makes you happy (ideally, while staying within the bounds of morality and not impinging on others)."
Which is not to say that it's bad, but it's not nihilism -- there is a belief there, it's what makes me happy has value. Which is fine, but simplistic. There are different types of happiness, happiness from immediate gratification and happiness from long-term goal reaching (ex. learning to play the piano).
If you try to make yourself happy all the time, I think you'll find yourself seeking (or reaching) immediate gratification too often, when the long-term goals are hard, difficult, but worthy of your effort. I started running the past year, and incrementally it's difficult, uncomfortable, and painful (especially at 7:00 AM at 30 F) -- but I feel so much better and consequently happier then I did a year ago.
My point is to not ignore the fact that time is running out, but to absorb the point, come to terms with it, and act with it (sort of mental Judo if you will). I prefer to understand that my time-span is limited, to accept the reality of that, and let it influence my judgment.
Not in that I'm adjusting my will everyday, or worrying endlessly about the issue. However, I do make important decisions with the knowledge that my life could end tomorrow, or the next day, or next year - and how would I feel about that decision given that context.
"I’d have nagging thoughts such as these: ‘Oh god, I’m 25 and I haven’t..."
f u c k . . . .
Just in case it is not a joke, I hope we all agree 25 is no where near any "I have no time for any more life experiences!!!" point...
I'm 35 now and I still get that feeling sometime, but I have changed focus in my career often enough to know that you can have small successes and appreciate them.
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
start living.
Evolution wired our brains for storytelling at a deep level. I would encourage you to take that desire for more factual fiction and turn it into some actual drafts. Having done the same in NaNoWriMo several times now, I highly recommend the learning experience.
Go to the moon? Reduce India’s poverty by at least 10%? Really?
Then 30 happened and I was a millionaire, in the currency I grew up with and that wasn't worth much (average annual senior tech salary in a 1st world city). Expectations change, as well as the understanding of money, inflation, etc. Most importantly, that it's cheaper to hedge your bets earlier rather than later.
For comparison, I'm 31, and my net worth is about 10.000 dollars :P . I definitely made a lot of suboptimal decisions along the way, but I think I'm finally on my way up.
While I'm a nonbeliever (no afterlife for me), I think that the blog post misses the "experienced happiness vs remembered happiness" point that people like Kahnemann and others have talked about:
http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper...
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-good-life/201010/exp...